3) When doing glusterfs -s to a different machine to retrieve the spec file,
it now fails. A glusterfs -s to the local machine succeeds. It looks like a
small buglet was introduced in the -s support.

Hmm, I think the -s issue may be bigger than that. This patchset also has
the peculiar property that a machine can mount a GlusterFS filesytem only
if it is also a server for that filesystem; other machines can't mount!

So, things look rather seriously broken at the moment in the tla
repository. I imagine it's a quick and easy fix, though...